Ship of Fools

Synopsis

1933: An ocean liner belonging to a second-rate German company is making a twenty-six day voyage from Veracruz, Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany. Along the way it will stop in Cuba to pick up a large group of Spanish farm laborers who are being shipped home and who will be housed like cattle in steerage. There it will also pick up La Condesa, a Spanish countess. It will stop in Tenerife, where the farm workers will disembark and where La Condesa will be sent to a German-run prison for her "traitorous" activities in Cuba. This voyage will be the last of three for the ship's doctor, Willi Schumann, who has a serious heart ailment and who thought he could find some meaning to his life through this job. Willi and La Condesa fall in love, with the ship's Captain Thiele, who is Willi's closest friend on board, believing the drug-addicted La Condesa is only using him to get her fixes. Willi and La Condesa have to figure out if there is a future for them after the voyage, as Willi's life also ...

1933: An ocean liner belonging to a second-rate German company is making a twenty-six day voyage from Veracruz, Mexico to Bremerhaven, Germany. Along the way it will stop in Cuba to pick up a large group of Spanish farm laborers who are being shipped home and who will be housed like cattle in steerage. There it will also pick up La Condesa, a Spanish countess. It will stop in Tenerife, where the farm workers will disembark and where La Condesa will be sent to a German-run prison for her "traitorous" activities in Cuba. This voyage will be the last of three for the ship's doctor, Willi Schumann, who has a serious heart ailment and who thought he could find some meaning to his life through this job. Willi and La Condesa fall in love, with the ship's Captain Thiele, who is Willi's closest friend on board, believing the drug-addicted La Condesa is only using him to get her fixes. Willi and La Condesa have to figure out if there is a future for them after the voyage, as Willi's life also ...

Cast

Tech specs

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by blanche-2 10 / 10

An all-star cast en route to Germany as Hitler takes power

"Ship of Fools" it may be, but it is also a Ship of Stars: Oskar
Werner, Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Simone Signoret, Jose Ferrer,
Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal, and Michael Dunn. Directed by Stanley
Kramer, this 1965 film deals with a German ship heading to its port in
Bremerhaven in 1933 and the lives of some of its passengers. Dunn
speaks to the audience at the beginning and end of the film, telling us
at first that it is a ship of fools and that we may find ourselves in
some of the characters.

This is one of the best all-star casts ever assembled, right up there
with "All About Eve" and "The Long, Hot Summer." The performances are
as magnificent as the film is relentlessly depressing, with a Jewish
man put at a table with a dwarf, while at the captain's table, another
man preaches about the new Germany and extermination of Jews, the
elderly, and those who are not fit. The optimistic Jew thinks Germany
owes the Jews a great deal and vice versa, and with 1 million Jews
there, certainly no one is going to kill all of them. A drug-addicted
woman is being deported to an island, and the very ill ship's doctor
falls in love with her and is tempted to give up his miserable life to
care for her. A couple with a passionate sex life finds they are poles
apart in every other way. A bitter, middle-aged woman comes to grips
with her loneliness and tries to drink it away. And on and on, on the
ship of fools. By the end of the film, looking at the Jew's beautiful
family on the dock, the viewer is ready to reach for a razor blade.

Oskar Werner (Tyrone Power's son-in-law) gives a magnificent
performance as a man discouraged about his life full of obligations,
exhausted from ill health, and reaching out for one last chance at
happiness. Simone Signoret, who falls for the doctor, is a warm and
sympathetic countess, nervous about her future, her past dried up. Lee
Marvin, as a southern drunk who wants to get laid, is perfection -
Vivien Leigh herself was impressed with him. "What's this about the
Jews?" he asks her. "I never saw a Jew until I was 15." "Perhaps you
were too busy lynching Negroes to care about the Jews," she replies.

For Vivien Leigh, Scarlett is far behind her - 26 years behind her, in
fact, with almost no vestige of her left due to Leigh's battles with
manic-depression and the dissolution of her marriage to Laurence
Olivier. As Scarlett herself would have said, "That girl doesn't exist
anymore." Her character is the Blanche Dubois who didn't go to the
asylum and some years later takes a cruise. Even the last gown she
wears, as she dances the Charleston, is reminiscent of Blanche. It's a
great performance as a beautiful woman who has seen better days and is
disillusioned and bitter about men, love, and romance. Her big scenes
at the end of the film - in the hallway and with Marvin - are
fantastic.

I have to believe, though "Ship of Fools" is downbeat, that it leaves
us with some hope. Dunn, as the dwarf philosopher, is too smart to
stick around Germany once things heat up; perhaps his Jewish friend
will see the light before it's too late. The Countess is a survivor; no
reason she shouldn't survive the island. But for all of them, a certain
way of life has ended, and they won't be going back.

One of the great films of the '60s.

Reviewed by theowinthrop 7 / 10

A World Going to Hell in a Hack...err Steamer

About 1490 or so a German writer named Sebastian Brandt wrote an
allegorical novel about the condition of mankind and types of men in
their follies called DER NARR SHIFF (I believe that is the German
title) which translates to "The Ship of Fools". At that time in Europe
many humanists wrote such allegories, the most famous one being
Erasmus' IN PRAISE OF FOLLY. Today Erasmus is still remembered, while
Brandt is studied only by students of the German language and it's
literature.

The title SHIP OF FOOLS was picked up by Katherine Anne Porter, who
(for most of her literary career) was an excellent short story writer.
At the tail end of that career she decided to tackle the larger target
of a complete, complex novel. As one can see from the comments on this
thread some people think she did superbly with her story and
characterizations, while others think she flubbed it. I've never read
the novel, but judging from the film version (and suspecting it is a
watered down treatment, like most novels into films) it must be an
above average work.

To me this is a film that actually stands out for individual moments by
the cast. Michael Dunn ferociously lecturing Heinz Ruhlmann about the
extreme anti-Semitism of the other passengers (not only the irritating
neo-Nazi Jose Ferrer, but most of the other passengers) that has caused
them (Dunn and Ruhlmann) to be banished to an isolated table for their
meals. Ruhlmann, a kindly, nice man (who manages to make Ferrer's
bigotry seem funny and stupid at one point) responds, "There are one
million Jews in Germany. Are they going to kill us all?" The dialog is
fairly sharp in these vignettes. Werner Klemperer, as a ship's officer,
responding from signals from Vivien Leigh for some type of shipboard
sexual encounter, discovering that Leigh is simply using him for a
matter of trivial amusement. He tells her off in a fine little speech,
which may have been the best delivered dialog of his career on film
(and is years away from his Col. Wilhelm Klinck on HOGAN'S HEROES).
Ferrer is half gregarious and half a bigoted swine, and totally
untrustworthy. In the coming war unlike Herr Schindler, if Ferrer made
a list it would be to turn Jews over to the authorities so he could get
their possessions. His comment about how he is not anti-Semitic, he
adores Arab people is almost as good as his spirited moment of pure
entertainment when he sings a comic German song for the passengers.
Even the minor actors on the screen have good moments. Witness the now
forgotten Henry Calvin (a few years earlier he had been one of the
"Laurel & Hardy" imitations in Walt Disney's BABES IN TOYLAND). Here he
is one of the Cuban peasants transported by the ship to pre-Civil War
Spain. His moment is when he tells off the racist Captain and his
officers who have looked down on these steerage passengers, referring
to the Captain as a pig. One can keep going on, especially with the
sympathetic Oscar Werner and Simone Signoret, and with Dunn again, the
only one of the passengers and crew who is intelligent.

For the point of the story is that this world of the 1930s is headed
(as the reader knows) for disaster that will engulf everyone. The café
society will not survive it. The Cuban immigrants will soon be killed
by Republican or Fascists in Spain. The Captain and his crew will be
drafted into Hitler's navy, and probably die in the Bismarck or some
other ship. Marvin will be drafted, and even if he should survive the
war he will find the segregation of his United States slowly eroded in
the decades following the war. Ferrer will probably be starving in the
ruins of Dresden or Berlin (if he is not killed in a bombing),
wondering what happened to that prosperity the Nazis promised in a
world without Jews. Every character in the story is facing the
conclusion of the standards that gave them some degree of stability -
some like Vivien Leigh and Simone Signoret are already going to pieces.
In some ways, at the end, Werner and Dunn may be the only lucky ones.
Werner is lucky because he will die before the war comes. Dunn...well
since he is the clearest in terms of reality of all the characters, he
will probably leave Europe before 1939, settle in the U.S. sitting out
the war there, and only return afterwards to gaze at the ruins the
others wrought.

Reviewed by gary brumburgh 9 / 10

A grand, glossy excursion, with a flavorful international cast keeping the weighty boat afloat.

One of my favorite indulges over the years has been "Ship of Fools," a 1965 glossy, episodic entertainment done strictly grand scale. Based on Katherine Anne Porter's epic novel, the Oscar-nominated "Best Picture" centers on a sundry group of travelers circa 1933 who clash "Grand Hotel" style on a German ocean liner bound, via Mexico, for Germany (and impending doom it would seem) just as strong Nazi sentiment was breeding. The ship becomes a microcosm of pre-WWII life and mores, with a plethora of subplots alternately swelling and ebbing throughout - situations that alter the course of some of its passengers and crew members, for better or worse.

From the clever opening collage of credits (don't miss this part) set to acatchy, flavorful Latin score to its fascinating all-star disembarkation at the end, it's smooth sailing for most of this trip, guided with an assured hand by the always capable Stanley ("Judgment at Nuremberg") Kramer, with certain cast members (Simone Signoret, Oskar Werner, Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Michael Dunn) coming off better than others (Jose Ferrer, Elizabeth Ashley, George Segal).

A number of compelling vignettes acted out by the choice, eclectic ensemble make up for the sometimes turgid melodramatics that occur on board as our "ship of fools" are forced to examine their own pride and prejudice while victimized by others. Who can forget the tormented Simone Signoret and Oskar Werner (both Oscar-nominated) as the morphine-addicted political prisoner and dutiful ship's physician who provide the film with its most poignant and tragic shipboard romance. Their clandestine encounters are exquisitely written and beautifully realized. Or Vivien Leigh's coy, aging elitist, Mary Treadwell, who delivers a brilliantly despairing monologue in front of a makeup mirror that, in turn, sets up a wildly climactic shoe-bashing scene with Lee Marvin's besotted baseballer when he viciously assaults, then profusely apologizes to the now-humiliated matron after mistaking her in the dark for a cooch dancer. Or Jose Greco & company's steamy, frenetic flamenco sequence during a raucous, after-hours party. Or dwarf actor Michael Dunn's sublime Greek Chorus that effectively bookends the movie (the Oscar-nominated Dunn subsequently played evil Dr. Loveless on TV's "Wild, Wild West" series). These glorious scenes and more help to balance out the less serviceable ones, particularly those involving Jose Ferrer's boisterous, irritating Nazi bigot who borders on caricature, and Elizabeth Ashley and George Segal's turbulent lovers who come off dull and forced.

Ernest Laszlo's lustrous black-and-white cinematography was suitably Oscar awarded, while the whole look, feel and tone of the movie is decidedly old-style theatre at its best. This movie has remained one of my all-time favorite wallows.